(dramatic music) - It's the number one lesson I learned and that I share with entrepreneurs is you have to be focused. I think anytime anything ever gets built, it's a miracle. It's so hard. 100% of my success is due to hard work and the other 100% is due to luck. - Today I have the pleasure of sitting down with an incredible entrepreneur who has made his name in the education sector. Adam and I are his lovely home. Hi, Adam, how are you? - I'm great, thanks for having me. - Okay, so before we dive into the conversation, I hope you don't mind. I'm just gonna share a small bite of yourself for those that may be a little unfamiliar with you. Adam starts off his career in real estate before taking a sales role at HubSpot. Adam then went into venture capital before co-founding and leading flat iron school. A coding bootcamp as CEO for nearly a decade. Adam grew flat iron to over 300 employees in five years and it was acquired by WeWork in 2017 and subsequently sold in 2020. Since leaving flat iron, Adam has held a number of advisory roles in education related companies, including at Team Tadar, Emerge Education and ETS. Adam also holds a bachelor's degree in policy analysis from Cornell University and MBA from Harvard Business School. So, Adam, incredible career so far. A lot of this conversation will revolve around your time at Flatiron, but I wanna start with something that your former bosses from HubSpot wrote about you in 2012. - Oh boy. - So, I'm gonna read out two quotes. The first one is from Jean Hopkins, the former VP of marketing at sales. Adam made it all look so easy, but I know that it was not easy and all of his HubSpot success can be attributed to a simple fact, hard work. As a leader, I know that he worked his leads. He never took anything granted and he made sure that he took every available opportunity that was open to him. The second one from Brian Halligan, co-founded former CEO of HubSpot. He's bright, he works as Taylor Lov, he's motivated and he's entrepreneurial. He started a startup within HubSpot around franchises and it works out great. I hope he dents the universe with his own startup someday. So, looking back, my first question is twofold. One, how much of your success and I guess any leads success would you tribute to that trait, hard work? And number two, did you know back in 2012, almost a prophecy by Brian Halligan that you wanted to be a startup founder because Brian certainly thought you had it in you? Well, so for your first question, I would say 100% of my success is due to hard work and the other 100% is due to luck. I think I am an incredibly forging person. I've been very, very lucky in my life, but I also work very, very hard. Is that something that you think most leaders have come across most other CEOs? They would all say it's hard work is so much a big part of that. I think anybody who's honest would have to admit that both of those play a role. I mean, maybe you're lucky enough to not have to work hard. I haven't met anybody like that. When I arrived at HubSpot, I had just graduated with my MBA and I decided to take a sales role because in my mind, in order to be successful, you needed to learn how to build things and how to sell things and they don't teach you how to sell in business school. And so I took that job and it was a very small startup at the time we were in a co-working space. We didn't even have our own office. And I was expected to make, you know, a hundred calls a day, just cold calling small business owners, trying to get them to buy our marketing software. And I did very, very well. I was at the top of the leader board. I never missed my quota. It got to the point where the sales leadership and the CEO were like, what are you doing differently? Maybe you can train the rest of the sales team. And you know, I got a little bit of an ego, like, oh wow, I'm a natural salesperson. I'm really good at this. So I actually downloaded all of the data from HubSpots Sales Force account on all of the sales people and all the performance metrics to see, where am I really good at closing? Am I really good at doing demos? Like where is my conversion rate different than everyone else? And then maybe I can train them on what I'm so good at and what makes me so special. And when I got all of that data from, you know, just tens of thousands of data points, it turns out that I had the exact same qualification rate as everybody else, the exact same rate of getting people to demo, the exact same close rate from demo to customer. I just made more phone calls, just putting more hours. And so because more was going in the top, more was coming at the bottom, you know, I was in the office at 10 o'clock calling Hawaii because Hawaii was still open. So yeah, even though technically and statistically, my performance was actually entirely unremarkable because I did more, I was more successful. >> Yeah, you often find that, other startups that are successful, just the ones that just played the long game and kept going beyond when they thought they were going to give up. Back to Brian's quote, did you have that ambition to be a start-up funder? Did you know you were going to do it? >> I had an instinct. My family were all entrepreneurs. I remember interviewing for a job at Lehman Brothers out of college. And I was in the final interview with the managing director and he looked at me and said, you don't want this job. I said, what do you mean you don't? I don't want this job. He said, you're going to hate it. You're an entrepreneur. I'm not going to hate it. My parents are immigrants from Morocco or financial situation have been flowed throughout my childhood. Poorly or well we were doing, they always prioritized education. It was always the number one thing. Making sure we could go to good schools, even on scholarships. It was always the number one most important thing in our family. My parents never went to college, but it was taken for granted that of course I'd go to college. Then I went there and I graduated and realized that I didn't get any, I wasn't qualified for any job. That was crazy. Considering going into the traditional consulting roles and stuff and ended up through serious events I'm happy to get into, starting my own real estate company. That was going well. By around 2008 the real estate market started getting a little crazy. Everything started getting really expensive. My company got a little big and I decided I don't really know what I'm doing here. Maybe I'll go to business school and that's where I'll learn how to really run a company. I was lucky I got out of real estate maybe six months before the 2008 crash. I enrolled in business school and the same thing kind of happened. I learned a lot about strategy and high level stuff and I met a lot of very smart and successful rich people. I still didn't know the basics of even, for example, sales. Every entrepreneur will tell you that sales is critical and yet they don't teach in business school. I went and took an entry level sales job coming out of a very prestigious business school. The people sitting next to me were some of them weren't even college graduates. After I left HubSpot and I was working in venture capital, one of the partners said, find an industry that you're passionate about that you believe in, that you believe needs change and go find the people to invest in that you think are going to make that change. I was always passionate about education both from that story but I also volunteered teaching in a prison. I taught in first grade. I'd always been around education so I said, "Well, education seems kind of broken. I was really lucky. I went to these great schools but still ended up in these weird jobs that didn't use my skills and I wasn't equipped. There's got to be a better solution here." At the same time, I was getting more and more expensive and less and less effective. So, tuition skyrocketing and job placement for college graduates going down. I said, "Let me find somebody that is fixing that and I'll try to invest in them. That's my job." I said, "I'm an investor, as a venture capitalist and I spoke to hundreds, maybe thousands of entrepreneurs and I couldn't find anybody fixing that problem. I found people building grade books software and textbook rentals and quiz apps and all kinds of stuff that was great around the edges but I like to say they felt like they were changing tires on a car with a busted engine. None of these things are really going to fix the problem." And then on Twitter, I met a guy who's teaching people out of code and getting them jobs. And that kind of blew my mind. I was like, "You can teach somebody to code from nothing in three months and get them a job. I didn't believe it. I asked him to introduce me to some of his students and he was like, "Sure." One thing left to another and that's how he started in flat-iron school. And he was doing this just all in a one-to-one basis. He was doing it as a hobby. He had his own startup but he sold and he was trying to figure out what to do next. And in that off period, he just decided to start teaching people how to code just for fun. Maybe make a little money on the side. And he was an incredible teacher that became my co-founder, Avi. One of the best teachers I've ever met. And you know, I was like, "You're so good at this. Why don't you just build something just for those people?" And he was like, "I didn't even graduate from college. I can't build the school." And I was like, "Well, why don't we do it together?" So that's how he started. I mean, it was literally, I think, 11 days from the time I tweeted at him to the time we set up an LLC and put money into a joint bank account. So I don't know if I recommend that strategy. But it worked very well. And that's without knowing anything about your co-founder, you just. Yeah, no, we just mad and got along and shared a vision. That's a very cool, founding story. What was it specifically about coding?
don't think you've had any coding related roles or experience in coding. So what made you think that coding is so valuable and dedicated decades to providing a solution to get people trained and into employment around coding? Well, at the time, when I was starting Flatiron School, the single biggest bottleneck for anybody building a startup was hiring engineers, not just building a startup, to be honest, every company in the world hires engineers, whether it's big medical complexes or manufacturing facilities, you know, anybody with a newsletter, anybody with a website needs people to help them support it. So there's this huge gap between the supply of engineers and the demand for software engineers. And A, we knew that that was the way to bring a lot of value to people immediately, but B, that was an area where we can create real credibility because colleges just weren't teaching this stuff. And so people who wanted to learn it didn't really have great options. That's either doing on their own, you know, maybe with some books or online resources, or potentially go back and get a graduate degree, but again, what they teach you at a graduate degree is very far away from what you're doing in the real world. It's like learning economics and then trying to be an accountant. It's just related and it's foundational, but it's not the real, it's not the work. And so at that time, that was an obvious thing to do. You could learn it so fast, get a huge increase in salary, tons of jobs out there, tons of demand for people wanting to learn it. I just made a ton of sense today that might be different, right? Today because of AI, I would argue that distribution is more important than building for a lot of these entry-level roles. And so maybe a marketing school might be more effective. I spoke to a classic Columbia and somebody asked me about starting a flat-iron school today, what would I do differently? And I said, I might make it a plumbing school because they have great careers and that's an area where there's a huge gap between sublime demand. But I think that's what schools should be doing is not saying, well, here's a thing we're going to teach and now we're going to teach over the next 200 years. They should be iterating and adjusting their curriculum to the needs of the market. And I guess with opportunities for people to have those careers? For sure. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm a very strong believer in the value of the liberal arts and holistic education. I just don't believe it should put you into crushing debt and not leave you with a skill that allows you to pay off your tuition. So I think schools need to do both things. Right. Not just, I guess, build a curriculum just around liberal arts. I guess you should have that. You're saying that they should have also that component to give you practical skills? I think schools have a responsibility to ensure their graduates are equipped to be successful in the future. And part of that is certainly a well-rounded and liberal arts education. But if that's all you do and you don't give them the skills to be successful in the job market and you charge $100,000 plus for that, I think that's criminal. So I think you can just deliver liberal arts education and make it super cheap or you can just do job training or you can charge a fortune for both or for one of them if you're at the end of the day, if you're providing a product that allows people to pay it off and not putting them into, you know, not creating the situation we see today where people are leaving school with crushing that and have jobs that probably didn't require the green in the first place. I read quite a few incredible stories on the website of all these people that basically come into flat-eye and mid-career and to completely change their career. I read story about a musician to date, data scientist and nurse to software engineer, a lawyer to data scientists. I think my favorite one is probably the MMA coach that changed to cybersecurity. What is it about coding? To me, it seems crazy that they're doing such a big career change and what is it about coding that seems to draw people from all sorts of different careers and say, "Actually, this is something I want to do." So a common thread, I think, among students at flat-iron school and I think most people that end up pursuing technology later in life is that they weren't exposed to this as a career option when they were younger, right? Which certainly back then, you know, today there's a little bit more coding in schools in K-12, but they just weren't exposed to when they were younger. They didn't happen to pick computer science as their major. They were sold to this idea that like, just study what you're passionate about and don't worry about the rest. It's only discovered it later in life that it was even a possibility. And I would say there's a difference between coding in computer science to use kind of cliché terms. Yeah, if you're going to be rewriting search algorithms at Google or building the models that open AI, you need a PhD in computer science and you need to be deeply steeped in mathematics. The vast majority of jobs are not that. The vast majority of jobs are actually dramatically more creative than technical. And I think that's the thing that really draws people to it. The realization that it's this combination of creative expression and analytical skills that you get to use your brain to solve problems, but you also get to create that's compelling. That's really exciting for people. And I think that's what most people are looking for when they decide to pursue this kind of career. Will you ever tempted to take one of your courses constantly? Maybe one day. The story, I mean from the answer of Flattin is incredible. You, you know, believe you first, we've had just 19 students and today I don't know, tens of thousands of students, I guess, have graduated. You have in-person campuses. You have a 97 or maybe as high as a 99% placement rate. Graduates have been hired at companies like Apple, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, PWC, Citibank and many, many more. I haven't been involved in Flattin School for three or three years. So I can't speak to any of that today, but at the time there has been great success. So obviously you built a business that's geared around helping others get job. I think many people would agree that in some ways there might not be a better purpose, a better business that has such a social mission, right? You've got that famous proverb that if you catch a fish for a person, you know, you can feed them for a day, teach them out of fish and you feed them for a lifetime. When you look back and you know, you read these individual stories and there are thousands of these stories, how does that make you feel like you're not just simply proud and you look back and you say, wow, I built a business where the whole purpose was to help people have a career and be able to provide for their family. I could see how you would assume pride would be the emotion. It's actually really, it's overwhelmingly gratitude, not pride. The Flattin School education, like most other educational opportunities, is one of the most expensive things anybody will buy in their whole lives. Our tuition has varied when we started. It was, I mean, the average student paid like $2,500 and went up to $18,000. It's bounced around, but I mean, I don't know what it is today. Let's say it's around $15,000. How many things in your life do you spend $15,000 on? That is a massive, massive investment. Not only are these people spending that amount of money, which is, I think probably the second or third biggest purchase you'll ever make after a house on a car. Not only are these people making this huge investment and trusting us with this huge investment, oftentimes leaving their jobs or even if they're not leaving a job, they're dedicating, you know, four months of their life, five months of their life to studying with us. So the amount of trust that people put in us to deliver on that promise that we were making, that's something that I'm still in awe of and immensely grateful for. I still think that pride should be the overriding emotion because to me, it's unbelievable just to help. Even you help one person in their life get a job, it's huge. When you're in it and you see how hard the students work and you especially see how hard the teachers work, which, I mean no matter how hard I try, I could never effectively show my appreciation for how hard the teachers worked. It's hard to take any credit. I was there, you know, I know I helped build the thing, but the students and the teachers were the magic. Everything else is nonsense. Although I will correct that. One part of our secret sauce was we invested a lot. Our biggest team at Flattern School was the Career Services team. We had these amazing career coaches and employer partnerships folks that would go out and form these partnerships and coach students on how to get a job and that whole team was the brainchild of Rebecca Rambaum, who's one of our first employees, who realized that, you know, one of the huge deltas between people who are able to get great jobs and not is not actually a skills. It's the ability to open the door and know how to get through the process. A lot of us are socialized, you know, we're brought up and we're in a soft way given these tools. I often tell people that one of the most valuable skills I got in business school is learning how to talk to rich people because I've never surrounded by rich people before that. And so just the ability to open doors for people to convince a place like Goldman Sachs to just talk to somebody who doesn't have a computer science degree or doesn't even have a college degree and consider them just opening that door and then coaching that student on like, you know, here's the here's how you prepare for an interview. Nobody's ever taught you this before, but we're going to teach you how to prepare for an interview. Just doing that unlocked so much value, the leveling the playing field. So that's the third area I'd allocate a lot of credit. How did you actually go about that because if you don't have the connections having not gone through that corporate world, how'd you get them to take that bet on you? Rebecca's team was a lot of hustle. So we would call, I mean again, a big part of it was there was a huge talent gap. So when you have organizations that are saying we need to hire 500 software engineers and we just cannot find them.
anywhere, you know, we could go up to those leaders and say, "Listen, give me an hour of your time and I will book four, fifteen minute interviews in that hour. Every fifteen minutes a new person will show up and you can interview them. And if you don't like any of them, we will never bother you again. But if you do, you've just unlocked a talent pipeline that will have a massive impact on your business. And so a lot of people were willing to give us a shot. And so that's how we started kind of opening a lot of doors. And then I remember the milestones, you know, the first time we got invited to, I remember it was the New York Times was holding their annual hiring day. And they brought in computer science graduates from Columbia and Baruch and NYU and Rutgers to do kind of these mass interviews. And they also invited us. So we were part, along with these five colleges, we were part of the mass interview day. So that alone was this huge deal, like just the fact that we were invited. But then, you know, a handful of our students actually got job offers. And I was like, well, if they got job offers, that means they actually beat out some of the students that have been studying this stuff for four years. So yeah, that was a major milestone. But yeah, again, it just came down to no matter what you do for people at the end of the day, a business is not going to hire somebody they don't feel as qualified. So we could throw all the parties and create all the bells and whistles and build all the relationships and do all the networking. But at the end of the day, we had to make sure that the students were equipped to do the job. And that, you know, was up to them and the teachers. But, you know, there are plenty of people out there that could get qualified, but don't have any other way of opening the door. So that was really valuable. Obviously, a little bit difficult to compare. But based on the people you know, your network, I'm sure you've spoken to many CEOs during that time. Do you think there are any differences between building a startup within the education sector compared to maybe other private sectors where I can imagine really they're the focuses on revenue, growth, et cetera, whereas education may be the milestones or I guess a little bit different. I mean, it's always hard. I think any startup has its own unique challenges and they're all impossible. You know, more like we were saying earlier, I think any time anything ever gets built, it's a miracle. It's so hard. One of the things that was uniquely challenging for us, that was both a benefit and a challenge was that we had this really sacred mission. Right? We were there to get people jobs. And that created a ton of tension in the organization. For example, because we had this great mission, we were able to recruit this unbelievably talented team, people who had absolutely no business working for us because they believed in the mission, which was incredible. At the same time, we perpetually had to balance the mission with the business. So, you know, there were times where like any other startup where, you know, there were ups and downs on the way up and there were times where we had to make difficult financial decisions. And those decisions could have easily been avoided if we said, you know what? Let's just double the acceptance rate. You know, we accepted 6% of students. Let's up at 10% next semester. And there we go. We'll get all the money we need. But we knew we were ready for that. We knew we couldn't deliver a quality product. And so balance it and, you know, making really hard decisions, whether it's letting people go or turning off programs or whatever, when you know it'd be so easy to solve that problem. But using the mission instead, that was really difficult. And that situation came up over and over and over again. Just how do we kind of maintain our integrity and make sure that we're doing right by the mission and by students rather than just chasing growth? A lot of non-CEOs, they assume that the life of a CEO is extremely glamorous, they get invited, everyone wants to talk to you. I guess the reality is probably a little different. I'm not sure. Like there is a little bit of the second you get any success. A lot of people start reaching out to you. But that's also, I would say, is probably, you know, one of the biggest risks as well. There's actually, you know, Harvard Business School has a case study on Flatiron School. They teach it every year and I go and speak there every year in their startup class. It's the first case. And it's about this moment in time at Flatiron School where we were running our on-campus programs and we also Google had reached out to us to do corporate training for them. And so we were doing that. We were also doing some nights and weekends programs. We also had some programs going on to train kids, like high school kids, how to code, that were really picking up steam. We also had some university partnerships. And so we were doing like 20 different things and they were all really impressive, right? Working with, you know, we had a partnership with Yale and we had, we were doing, you know, BDB with Google and we had this amazing partnership with Teach for America, the train teachers, just like all these incredible things. But they were all kind of moving kind of slow and kind of okay. And, you know, like we just said, building one great product is nearly impossible. Trying to do five at once is game over. I probably wasted a year plus, maybe two, because we were unfocused, because all of these things that in a vacuum seemed like great ideas were just way too expensive in terms of our ability to focus and grow and improve on one core thing. And so at some point we made a decision to shut down a bunch of our programs, even though they were well liked and successful and even financially successful, we just realized we're doing way too many things. We can't grow, you know, no great business has been built by, you know, 20 little lines of business. You have to do one thing really, really well. Try to be the best in the world at it. And so that's the downside of getting all that attention and all that, you know, people coming at you is it's pretty easy to get distracted and to get unfocused. So it's like cautionary tale that they teach in the first class at HBS, the start of classes. Don't be don't make a mistake I made. So is that a case of just niching down? Just focus. Just have it. It's the number one lesson I learned and that I share with entrepreneurs is you have to be focused. You have to know what you're going to do and you have to know what you're not doing and focus on what's important. You mentioned one things that you mentioned or I read up that you said was that there's three key functions to the CEO. There's second division, which I guess comes back to that ideal focus. Getting resources, I guess, to enable the company to grow and hiring and retaining a team and that you spent, you underspent the time hiring yet you also said that you spent about 25% of your time hiring. So to me that seems like heck of a lot of time. Are the best CEOs essentially the best talent recruiters? I don't know if I can speak for all the best CEOs. I'm generally weary of first suspicious of rules like that. I think there are a lot of ways to be successful. There's no one right or wrong way, but I can tell you that for me personally, the times when flat-iron school was at its best was when I knew I had a great team in place and let them do their thing. Almost to a T like you can actually correlate, for example, a revenue growth or a success metrics. This is not going to sound good, but the times when I was either fundraising or selling the company or selling the company again, you know, when you're going through a financial process like that, it is all encompassing and it takes a long time. So it's like six months to raise your series A and then six months raising your series B or six months to a year of trying to sell the company, running an M&A process and then again, we sold it out again. And during those blocks of time, you're doing nothing else. And during those blocks of time was when the company was the most successful because I was so focused on that that the team was able to just do what they do best. Every single person I hired was infinitely better than I could ever be at their function. My head of HR was just a thousand times better with people. My head of marketing, my head of operations, all of these people were just infinitely better at their jobs than I could ever be. So yeah, if you can do that. That does come back to your point that essentially, yeah, you could from where I'm sitting, it sounds like that therefore yes, you were just an incredible talent recruiter. You understood who needs to be doing what and finding the best possible pieces for that. Yeah, I think you have to be very, very good at it. Even if you happen to be great at all these things, I don't know that anybody that's great at all of those things. That can be the best person in the room and that finance recruiting, HR, marketing, sales. But even if you are, at some point, you just can't do everything. It's physically impossible. I saw just about this. The lengths that you would go for recruiting are rather you never used recruitment agencies. I did. It never worked out. You were very hands on in the process and maybe twice. I'd love to hear you share that story in real in person when you went to hire your COO but I don't think you necessarily knew that you were hiring her as a CEO at the time. But I thought this is the story is incredible. Oh, wow. I don't even know if I remember the whole story. But in the beginning we were hiring, I think a CMO and we interviewed this person and she was going, I reached out to somebody that I had met previously who I really respected, but she had just accepted another job and she said, "But you know what? I know somebody really great you should talk to her." So she introduced me and immediately as I go, "This person is incredible. We have to try to hire her." I mean, from that moment I effectively did nothing but focus on doing everything. I can't take them to take the job. I remember at some point in the process she, you know, I was texting her and I was like, "Hey, what are we going to get together more? I want to talk about the vision."
and she was like, I think as a joke, she said, 'cause I was like, I don't wanna wait 'til next week and I think as a joke, she said, well, unless you wanna come to Penn Station at 6am, you're gonna have to wait 'til next week 'cause I'm going out of town. I was like, perfect, I mean, you at Penn Station at 6am. And I remember we said, we'll meet by the TGI Fridays and at 6am, 6.05, 6.15, you don't get great service. I'm like, what is going on? This person doesn't feel like somebody who just goes to me or be late and then eventually realize that there are two TGI Fridays in Penn Station and so great. But yeah, when I found the right person for a role, I literally cleared my schedule and did nothing but focus on hiring that person. - It comes back to the very first thing I mentioned about hard work. I don't think I know many people that would have gone to such lengths. I would have just said, okay, okay, we'll meet next week. It's like, you're like, no, I see this person. I wanna speak to her today tomorrow. I'm gonna do everything to do with it. - Well, yeah, because it's leverage. It's not just the baseline or kind of amateur weight of you. It is, if I get this purse, if I get this set of marketing or if I get this set of people or whatever, then I won't have to do it anymore. And my time will be freed up. That alone should be a motivator. But if you're going after great people, it's, if I get this person, they're gonna do a way better job than I'm currently doing. So it's really hard. Recruiting is really, really hard. It's really expensive. And it's kind of a garbage process still. Like, I'd argue it's the most important thing that happens in any organization is hiring. And it's still the least sophisticated thing we do. We have these kind of nonsense interview processes where we ask people their strengths and weaknesses and kind of try to figure out if they're smart and if they're a culture fit, whatever that means, it's wild to me that that is still the process. - Do you have an alternative? I mean, I don't want an alternative would look like. - I know. I think that's, I think if somebody figured out an alternative, everybody would be using it. - So good opportunity there. Something that you said, which I think was on the podcast, so I very much enjoyed hearing it, which was that, I'd rather hire a good teacher and teach them how to code, then hire an engineer who knows coding and teach them how to teach. - Yeah. - Would you say the same applies to leadership that maybe it's better to hire someone that has that leadership qualities, but may not necessarily have done, you know, led the team in this specific role, or is that other around that someone who's very good at a job and then trying to teach them those leadership skills? - I think there's a lot of different ways to lead. I don't think there's one way to do it. We had our, for example, a flat iron school. We had our set of values that we would hire for and what we would look, you know, what we would look for in people, but, you know, when I look across every role I've had and every company I've been involved with, at the end of the day, it just comes down to two things. Are they competent? Like, are they smart enough to do the job? There are some jobs that require a certain level of competence, right? And do they care? Does this person really care? Are they gonna kind of figure out things along the edges? Are they gonna wait to be told, go do this? Or are they gonna say, hmm, here's a better way to do this? Let me explore that. If you can find people that are smart and really, really care about what they're doing, I think you're 99% of the way there. - Okay. You know that's what they mentioned on another podcast a few years ago, is about, I think maybe it was with the Harvard Business School, some of the things that you did, because you mentioned, you talk about communication, so important to communicate with your team internally and how you did that over the years as you grew, because obviously communicating to a team of 10 is very different to communicate to a team of 300. So you mentioned that, you first started doing the weekly internal newsletter every Sunday, did that for five years, and then as a team grew, you did these five years of a weekly email on Sunday nights. - How big were they? - How big were they? How big were they? How long were they? - I mean, it varied week to week, although I did look at the first one I ever wrote, which was in 2012, and my post script was all about Bitcoin. - Okay. - And I didn't even buy any Bitcoin. - I was writing about Bitcoin in 2012, and I can't believe I didn't buy any. - Okay, I think a lot of people would say the same. So you had this weekly newsletter, and then as you grew, you did a, I think you did like a, you were in the fourth of you, did some in, you know, all hands-in meeting. - Communication is critical, and very, very, very hard to figure out. So there's two challenges. One is, yeah, what you said, what works for a company that's 10 people, doesn't work for 50, doesn't work for 100, doesn't work for 300, so if you have to constantly have to change it. But then even when you get to a cadence, right, let's say you have 200 employees, and you figure out a communication structure, maybe you send a weekly newsletter, and you do a quarterly all hands, and you do a monthly AMA, or something, right? You figure out what works for you. Even if that, if you nail that, and that starts to work really well, after three to six months, it's gonna stop working, not because you grew, not because anything changes, but because it just gets boring. It's the same newsletter every Sunday, it's the same all hands, it's a, you know, when there's news that's different, but you know, you have to keep people engaged and interested, and it's really, really difficult, but that's your job. You know, I remember early on in flat iron school, there was some like dumb thing, like people missed a deadline to select their insurance, or something like that, and I was annoyed because I was like, we sent this email two weeks ago, and I think something my COO taught me is that, you know, the purpose of communication is to deliver the information to the other person, and have them internalize it. So if they didn't internalize it, it's not their fault. It's your fault, you didn't communicate it effectively. So you can't point to like, well, we sent that email, so if you didn't know too bad, like we, you know, we failed to communicate it in a way that people would internalize. So yeah, I think you have to constantly be thinking about what is important for people to know, and how do you make sure to communicate that, and keep that message fresh. That's why you hear a lot of leaders talking about like, you have to repeat the mission over and over and over again, you have to talk about the vision, you have to remind people we're going, because it's, you know, when you're making choices about do I work on this or do I work on that, like you want everybody to be thinking about the exact same thing. - When it came to testing out these ideas and trying out different, these different forms of communication, is that something that you saw other people doing? Is that just something you came up with yourself? - Oh, I mean, all of the above. I mean, my wife is a chief people officer, so that's a huge cheat code. (laughs) I borrowed a lot from her insights over the years, but yeah, I mean, you know, some things that just tried, some things I got from the team, some things I learned from other companies, that other companies did well. From an organizational perspective, it's tempting to try to reinvent the wheel and say, well, as a company, we're going to do things this way. We're going to do the review process this way, or we're going to change things, or we're not like that. And sometimes that's fine for your culture, but like often there's like a good reason why most companies do things a certain way, and you know, before just completely dismissing that, it's worth trying to understand why things are done that way. - Okay, I want to talk and touch upon the idea. Before we start recording, I mentioned a little bit about personal branding. This obviously very new, very trendy now. Was that something that you were conscious of at the time, thinking about how could you position yourself as a thought leader in the space, or was very much that the results speak for themselves? We have a great school, we have great teachers, great graduates, we get good jobs. That's all the PR that we need. It was not, I mean, it probably should have been, and I guess I did do a fair amount of it inadvertently. So I was never really concerned with my personal brand or anything, but in the beginning, for example, a huge source of customers and students came by finding us in places like Reddit and Pura. And so I spent hours and hours and hours every day, just writing tons of posts and content and answering questions. And I think I developed a pretty unique voice in that sphere where I would never try to sell anybody when people ask, well, should I go to Flatiron School or should I do the Southern program? I would say, well, it depends on you, here are the pros, here are the cons, here's what other folks are better at. If you're looking for this type of thing, you should probably go there. If you want this type of thing, we might be the right choice. So I think developing that kind of more of a trusted voice was really impactful. But I was doing it just because I knew that's where students were asking questions, so that's where I went. It seemed like an obvious thing to do, but I never thought about it in terms of my personal brand. - And this you did under your own name or as anonymous? Okay, so then that would definitely, today we think of personal brand name, it was LinkedIn, and the popular channel was actually that's probably exactly what you said, that's where your students are. Of course, then that's where you need to build your brand. So the answer in short was kind of yes, you did it, but maybe subcook, maybe without realizing what you were doing. Okay, you mentioned it at the beginning. This is obviously, I have to talk about it because this is the future of AI, et cetera. How do you see the future of education with AI and coding, what do you think it's gonna go? - It's hard to say, pretend AI doesn't exist for a second. If I asked you what K12 schools should look like in the world of the internet and computers and technology and coding, you'd have a lot of ideas. The way we teach students today, given the technology we have, even without AI, is archaic. So I think even before AI, for the past 20 years, I think people have been saying, oh my God, the internet technology, all this stuff, like it's gonna dramatically change education. And it has kind of, but like most education still comes down.
to like, you know, the sage on a stage, person standing in front of a classroom, saying a bunch of stuff, and then giving kids homework. So AI is the next thing in a long line of things that are potentially disrupting how we thought about education. And I think it should change the way we teach and learn dramatically in the same way that the computer and the internet should have changed the way we learn dramatically. Unfortunately, I think the systems are very, very slow to adapt. You know, I guess with AI now, I mean, every single high school in college kid I know is using Chagy Petita right their papers. So I think professors are having to get more creative about the types of assignments they offer, maybe having people do stuff in class, or, but, you know, fundamentally, I think technology has been around for a really long time and our education system has not come close to catching up with it. So I'm not optimistic about this being some dramatic upheaval. I do think that their change is coming to the educational system, but it's more inside out than outside in. It's because the, I think the, you know, at the higher education level, I think the financial model is just completely collapsing. And at the K-12 model, we have a huge shortage of qualified teachers in the country. And so I think because of those things, these institutions are being forced to finally say, okay, well, we just don't have anybody to teach chemistry in our school district. Maybe we should be thinking about how technology can help us solve this problem. Yeah, I think things will change a lot, but not because it's just the latest technical innovation. What, then, to ask about your personal future, what would get you back in the game as a CEO? You know, I always say that the way I evaluate opportunities is, I look for three things. I want to do something that has the opportunity to be big, because, you know, why not? Doing something small is just as hard. I've seen it. My whole family is small business owners, so it might as well try to do something big. I want it to be meaningful, like I want, to be able to look myself in the mirror and feel good about what I'm doing. And the third is I want to do it with people that I love and respect and can learn from. That I like spending the day with. You spend more time with your colleagues than you do with your family, more awake time in areas. So, you know, when I find something that tracks those three boxes, I'll get back in the game. Any specific industries or. No. Just those are the three. Those are the three. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Adam, for making the time for this discussion and sharing your insights on leadership and the education sector. So do you want to share a little bit about the type of work that you do today? So, while searching for those things, I've been filling my time with a lot of consulting, mostly helping organizations figure out how to implement AI for growth. So, I think a lot of companies have figured out or well on the way to figuring out how to incorporate AI on the product side. I've been helping companies, you know, mid to large companies put AI into their back office operations to increase the sales efficiency, marketing, content creation, all that kind of stuff. It's fun and interesting work and I get to, you know, be at the cutting edge of all the new stuff that's coming out. But, you know, it doesn't check the three boxes quite yet, so. And if someone wants to, they want to get in touch with you, or follow you, it would be the best. I'm very easy to find them online. So, I just. All my contact information is on there. Okay, super. Okay, feel free. Thank you again, Adam, for joining me today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to Becoming a CEO. If you enjoyed this conversation, follow the podcast so you don't miss future episodes. And if you have any feedback or would like to suggest a guest, please send an email to
[email protected]. And finally, if you're a CEO or founder who's building something great, but isn't fully leveraging a reputation to grow the business, that's exactly what we help with at CEO Branding. You can find out more and book a discovery call at www.ceobranding.co. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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